Grandma Clara
By Joyce Sutphen

About noon she arrived in her blue-and-
white Bel Air by Chevrolet, in which she
did not see the USA but only

the road from her house in town to the farm
she built with her husband, who died as soon
as they retired, and that is why she came

each day—just to have something to do, to
help us with the work we had inherited
from her: the strawberry fields, gardens,

apple orchards, and grapevines, rhubarb stalks,
potato patch, rows of sweet corn; wild plums,
and gooseberries—and all those fields of com

and oats and hay, pastures too, above the
house and woods or down by the meadow where
the green grass grew. Who would not return to

such a place? I see her walking across
the lawn in her straw hat, hoe in hand,
ready to chop away whatever weeds

dared grow between the perfectly mounded
hills of potatoes, those rows that would feed
us all through the cold white winter when she

would come less often though we would see her
every morning in the back of church—
praying, no doubt, for the whole crop of us.
 

Reproduced from Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems by Joyce Sutphen by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Forthcoming October 2019 with the University of Nebraska Press. (preorder now)

It's the birthday of novelist Robert Stone (books by this author), born in Brooklyn (1937). He was raised by his mother, who was schizophrenic, and when she was institutionalized, he spent several years in a Catholic orphanage. Sometimes he and his mother would drive across the country and end up in a Salvation Army somewhere, or a random hotel. He said: "My early life was very strange. I was a solitary; radio fashioned my imagination. Radio narrative always has to embody a full account of both action and scene. I began to do that myself. When I was seven or eight, I'd walk through Central Park like Sam Spade, describing aloud what I was doing, becoming both the actor and the writer setting him into the scene. That was where I developed an inner ear."

Stone dropped out of high school to join the Navy, then moved back to New York City. He worked as a copy boy at the Daily News, and during his brief stint at NYU, he met Janice Burr, the woman he eventually married. They moved to New Orleans, and Stone found work as a census-taker. He walked every neighborhood of New Orleans, asking questions. He wrote: "The closer to street level you live, the more you have lessons thrust upon you."

His time in New Orleans inspired his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1967). It begins: "The day before, Rheinhardt had bought a pint of whiskey in Opelika and saved it all afternoon while the bus coursed down through red clay and pine hills to the Gulf. Then, after sundown, he had opened the bottle and shared it with the boy who sold bibles, the blond gangling country boy in the next seat. Most of the night, as the black cypress shot by outside, Rheinhardt had listened to the boy talk about money — commissions and good territories and profits — the boy had gone on for hours with an awed and innocent greed. Rheinhardt had sat silently, passing the bottle and listening."

Stone served as a correspondent in Vietnam for a British magazine, which quickly folded, but he got enough material to return home and write the novel Dog Soldiers (1974). Dog Soldiers is the story of a burnt-out playwright named John Converse who leaves the fading counterculture of California to work as a correspondent in Vietnam and ends up smuggling heroin out of the country. Dog Soldiers won the National Book Award.

Stone's other books include Children of Light (1986); Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (2007), a memoir; and Fun With Problems (2010), a book of short stories. His last novel was Death of the Black-Haired Girl (2013). Robert Stone died Jaunary 10, 2015 in Key West, Florida.

He said: "Writing is lonely. [...] But most of the time you are in a room by yourself, you know. Writers spend more time in rooms, staying awake in quiet rooms, than they do hunting lions in Africa. So, it's a bad life for a person because it's so lonely and because it consists of such highs and lows, and there's not always anywhere to take these emotional states. [...] It's a life that's tough to sustain without falling prey to some kind of beguiling diversion that's not good for you."

It's the birthday of poet X.J. Kennedy (books by this author), born Joseph Charles Kennedy in Dover, New Jersey (1929). He grew up in a working-class Irish-American family. His father, a timekeeper at the local boiler factory, recited poems to his son. Kennedy went to college, where he started reading and writing poetry, then served in the Navy for four years. He said, "I enlisted in the Navy to avoid serving in the infantry. I'd also been reading Moby Dick, and I had a rather glamorous view of the seas." Kennedy's first book of poetry was called Nude Descending a Staircase (1961). It was written for adults, but there were two poems in it that he intended for children. He went on to publish many books of children's poems, including Ghastlies, Goops, and Pinchushions (1989), and City Kids: Street and Skyscraper Rhymes (2010).

Kennedy has also written poetry textbooks and volumes of poetry for adults, including Dark Horses (1992) and The Lords of Misrule: Poems 1992-2002 (2002).

He said, "I like poems where you don't really know whether to laugh or cry when you read them."